Development of the Social-Emotional Developmental Screening Scale for Thai Children Aged 0-48 Months

Abstract

The present cross-sectional descriptive study developed a Social-Emotional Developmental Screening Scale for Thai children aged from 0 – 48 months and tested its psychometric properties. The developed scale was created based on the foundation of Functional Emotional Development. This study was divided into two phases. In the 1st phase, to generate items and to test primary qualities of the scale, Item-Objective Congruence Index (IOC) from six expert opinions and internal consistency reliability were examined. The preliminary results found that IOC of the item pool was ≥ 0.5 and Cronbach’s alpha coefficient for the children aged 6-9 months was below the minimum acceptable value. Thus, the items were rewritten. In the 2nd phase, to test the degree to which this scale consistently measures a construct across items, Cronbach’s alpha and corrected item-item total correlation were evaluated by analyzing data from 223 participants. The results indicated that the scale’s final version had moderate to high values of Cronbach’s alpha ranging from 0.604 to 0.904 and the item pool showed the item-total correlation value was more than 0.2. There was a significant difference in scores for normal children (M = 114.57, SD = 25.58) and children with social and emotional developmental difficulties (M = 81.67, SD = 19.34), Z = -4.483, p < .001. The average score of each age group was as follows; aged 0-5 months (M = 20.11, SD = 3.09), 6-9 months (M = 48.96, SD = 5.96), 10-18 months (M = 84.88, SD = 9.90), 19-30 months (M = 103.32, SD = 16.61) and 31-48 months (M = 139.81, SD = 12.28). The analysis of the scale’s psychometric properties resulted in good values of internal consistency and the scale can be used to differentiate children with social-emotional developmental problems from normal children. To gain more benefit from this scale, practitioners should have an understanding of social-emotional developmental concepts.